Abstract: Semiconductors are essential materials that affect our everyday life in the modern world. Two-dimensional semiconductors with high mobility and moderate bandgap are particularly attractive today because of their potential application in fast, low-power, and ultrasmall/thin electronic devices. We investigate the electronic structures of a new layered air-stable oxide semiconductor, Bi2O2Se, with ultrahigh mobility (~2.8 × 105 cm2/V⋅s at 2.0 K) and moderate bandgap (~0.8 eV). Combining angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy and scanning tunneling microscopy, we mapped out the complete band structures of Bi2O2Se with key parameters (for example, effective mass, Fermi velocity, and bandgap). The unusual spatial uniformity of the bandgap without undesired in-gap states on the sample surface with up to ~50% defects makes Bi2O2Se an ideal semiconductor for future electronic applications. In addition, the structural compatibility between Bi2O2Se and interesting perovskite oxides (for example, cuprate high–transition temperature superconductors and commonly used substrate material SrTiO3) further makes heterostructures between Bi2O2Se and these oxides possible platforms for realizing novel physical phenomena, such as topological superconductivity, Josephson junction field-effect transistor, new superconducting optoelectronics, and novel lasers.

Abstract: Group VIII transition-metal dichalcogenides have recently been proposed to host type-II Dirac fermions. They are Lorentz-violating quasiparticles marked by a strongly tilted conic dispersion along a certain momentum direction and therefore have no analogs in the standard model. Using high-resolution angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, we systematically studied the electronic structure of PtSe2 in the full three-dimensional Brillouin zone. As predicted, a pair of type-II Dirac crossings is experimentally confirmed along the kz axis. Interestingly, we observed conic surface states around time-reversal-invariant momenta
¯¯¯
Γ and
¯¯¯¯
M points. The signatures of nontrivial topology are confirmed by the first-principles calculation, which shows an intricate parity inversion of bulk states. Our discoveries not only contribute to a better understanding of topological band structure in PtSe2 but also help further explore the exotic properties, as well as potential application, of group VIII transition-metal dichalcogenides.